[Pynchon's essay was the first entry in a summer series devoted to the seven deadly sins]

The Deadly Sins/Sloth

"Nearer, My Couch, to Thee"

By Thomas Pynchon

IN his classical discussion of the subject in the
"Summa Theologica," Aquinas termed Sloth, or
acedia, one of the seven capital sins. He said he
was using "capital" to mean "primary" or "at the
head of" because such sins gave rise to others, but
there was an additional and darker sense resonating
luridly just beneath and not hurting the power of
his argument, for the word also meant "deserving of
capital punishment." Hence the equivalent term
"mortal," as well as the punchier English "deadly."

But come on, isn't that kind of extreme, death
for something as lightweight as Sloth? Sitting
there on some medieval death row, going, "So, look,
no offense, but what'd they pop you for anyway?"

"Ah, usual story, they came around at the
wrong time of day, I end up taking out half of some
sheriff's unit with my two-cubit crossbow, firing
three-quarter-inch bolts on auto feed. Anger, I
guess.... How about you?"

"Um, well ... it wasn't anger...."

"Ha! Another one of these Sloth cases, right?"

". . fact, it wasn't even me."

"Never is, slugger -- say, look, it's almost
time for lunch. You wouldn't happen to be a writer,
by any chance?"

Writers of course are considered the mavens of
Sloth. They are approached all the time on the
subject, not only for free advice, but also to
speak at Sloth Symposia, head up Sloth Task Forces,
testify as expert witnesses at Sloth Hearings. The
stereotype arises in part from our conspicuous
presence in jobs where pay is by the word, and
deadlines are tight and final -- we are presumed to
know from piecework and the convertibility of time
and money. In addition, there is all the glamorous
folklore surrounding writer's block, an affliction
known sometimes to resolve itself dramatically and
without warning, much like constipation, and
(hence?) finding wide sympathy among readers.

Writer's block, however, is a trip to the
theme park of your choice alongside the mortal sin
that produces it. Like each of the other six, Sloth
was supposed to be the progenitor of a whole family
of lesser, or venial, sins, among them Idleness,
Drowsiness, Restlessness of the Body, Instability
and Loquacity. "Acedia" in Latin means sorrow,
deliberately self-directed, turned away from God, a
loss of spiritual determination that then feeds
back on in to the process, soon enough producing
what are currently known as guilt and depression,
eventually pushing us to where we will do anything,
in the way of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid
the discomfort.

But Sloth's offspring, though bad -- to
paraphrase the Shangri-Las -- are not always evil,
for example what Aquinas terms Uneasiness of the
Mind, or "rushing after various things without
rhyme or reason," which, "if it pertains to the
imaginative power... is called curiosity." It is of
course precisely in such episodes of mental
traveling that writers are known to do good work,
sometimes even their best, solving formal problems,
getting advice from Beyond, having hypnagogic
adventures that with luck can be recovered later
on. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what
we do. We sell our dreams. So real money actually
proceeds from Sloth, although this transformation
is said to be even more amazing elsewhere in the
entertainment sector, where idle exercises in
poolside loquacity have not infrequently generated
tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

As a topic for fiction, Sloth over the next
few centuries after Aquinas had a few big
successes, notably "Hamlet," but not until arriving
on the shores of America did it take the next
important step in its evolution. Between Franklin's
hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville's
doomed scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of
early America, consolidating itself as a Christian
capitalist state, even as acedia was in the last
stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a
secular condition.

Philadelphia, by Franklin's time, answered
less and less to the religious vision that William
Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a
kind of high-output machine, materials and labor
going in, goods and services coming out, traffic
inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city
blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading into
ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all
rectified, orthogonal. (Dickens,; visiting in 1842,
remarked, "After walking about in it for an hour or
two, I felt that I would have given the world for a
crooked street.") Spiritual matters were not quite
as immediate as material ones, like productivity!
Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God or
spiritual good as against a particular sort of
time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible --
that is, against clock time, which got everybody
early to bed and early to rise.

Poor Richard was not shy in expressing his
distaste for Sloth. When he was not merely
repeating well-known British proverbs on the
subject, he was contributing Great Awakening- style
outbursts of his own -- "O Lazy-bones ! Dost think
God would have given thee arms and legs if he had
not designed thou shouldst use them?" Beneath the
rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on,
ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was
evaded or put off now had to be made up for later,
and at a higher level of intensity. "You may delay,
but time will not." And Sloth, being continual
evasion, just kept piling up like a budget deficit,
while the dimensions of the inevitable payback grew
ever less merciful.

In the idea of time that had begun to rule
city life in Poor Richard's day, where every second
was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in
the course of its flow could have been called
nonlinear, unless you counted the ungovernable warp
of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. In
Frances M. Barbour's 1974 concordance of the
sayings, there is nothing to be found under
"Dreams," dreams being as unwelcome in Philly back
then as their frequent companion, sleep, which was
considered time away from accumulating wealth, time
that had to be tithed back into the order of things
to purchase 20 hours of productive waking. During
the Poor Richard years, Franklin, according to the
"Autobiography," was allowing himself from l A.M.
to 5 A.M. for sleep. The other major nonwork block
of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted
to the Evening Question, "What good have I done
this day?" This must have been the schedule's only
occasion for drifting into reverie -- there would
seem to have been no other room for speculations,
dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal
machine was supposed to be nonfiction.

BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A
Story of Wall-Street" (1853), acedia had lost the
last of its religious reverberations and was now an
offense against the economy. Right in the heart of
robberbaron capitalism, the title character
develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is
like one of those western tales where the desperado
keeps making choices that only herd him closer to
the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits
there in an office on Wall Street repeating, "I
would prefer not to." While his options go rapidly
narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and
substance, is actually brought to question the
assumptions of his own life by this miserable
scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the
lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism,
nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore
with the daily order, thus bringing up the
interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth,
a person who collaborates with the root of all
evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a
paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does
nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow? "Bartleby"
is the first great epic of modern Sloth, presently
to be followed by work from the likes of Kafka,
Hemingway, Proust, Sartre, Musil and othersĄtake
your own favorite list of writers after Melville
and you're bound sooner or later to run into a
character bearing a sorrow recognizable as
peculiarly of our own time.

In this century we have come to think of Sloth
as primarily political, a failure of public will
allowing the introduction of evil policies and the
rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist
ascendancy of the 1920's and 30's being perhaps
Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the
Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and
nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to
do what they should because of the effort involved.
How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for
choosing good present themselves in public and
private for us every day, and we pass them by.
Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life.
Though it has never lost its deepest notes of
mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as
outright despair, or as real, for it is despair
bought at a discount price, a deliberate turning
against faith in anything because of the
inconvenience faith presents to the pursuit of
quotidian lusts, angers and the rest. The
compulsive pessimist's last defense -- stay still
enough and the blade of the scythe, somehow, will
pass by -- Sloth is our background radiation, our
easy-listening station -- it is everywhere, and no
longer noticed.

Any discussion of Sloth in the present day is
of course incomplete without considering
television, with its gifts of paralysis, along with
its creature and symbiont, the notorious Couch
Potato. Tales spun in idleness find us Tubeside,
supine, chiropractic fodder, sucking it all in,
re-enacting in reverse the transaction between
dream and revenue that brought these colored
shadows here to begin with so that we might feed,
uncritically, committing the six other deadly sins
in parallel, eating too much, envying the
celebrated, coveting merchandise, lusting after
images, angry at the news, perversely proud of
whatever distance we may enjoy between our couches
and what appears on the screen.

Sad but true. Yet, chiefly owing to the timely
invention -- not a minute too soon ! -- of the
remote control and the VCR, maybe there is hope
after all. Television time is no longer the linear
and uniform commodity it once was. Not when you
have instant channel selection, fast-forward,
rewind and so forth. Video time can be reshaped at
will. What may have seemed under the old
dispensation like time wasted and unrecoverable is
now perhaps not quite as simply structured. If
Sloth can be defined as the pretense, in the
tradition of American settlement and spoliation,
that time is one more nonfinite resource, there to
be exploited forever, then we may for now at least
have found the illusion, the effect, of
controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and
repeating time -- even imagining that we can escape
it. Sins against video time will have to be
radically redefined.

Is some kind of change already in the offing?
A recent issue of The National Enquirer announced
the winner of their contest for the King of Spuds,
or top Couch Potato in the United States, culled
from about a thousand entries. "'All l do is watch
television and work,' admits the 35-year-old
bachelor, who keeps three TV sets blaring 24 hours
a day at his Fridley, Minn., home and watches a
fourth set on the job.

"'There's nothing I like more than sitting
around with a six-pack of beer, some chips and a
remote control.... The TV station even featured me
in a town parade. They went into my house, got my
couch and put it on a float. I sat on the couch in
my bathrobe and rode in the parade ! '"

* * *

Sure, but is it Sloth? The fourth television
set at work, the fact that twice, the Tuber in
question mentions sitting and not reclining,
suggest something different here. Channel-surfing
and VCR-jockeying may require a more nonlinear
awareness than may be entirely compatible with the
venerable sin of Sloth -- some inner alertness or
tension, as of someone sitting in a yoga posture,
or in Zen meditation. Is Sloth once more about to
be, somehow, transcended? Another possibility of
course is that we have not passed beyond acedia at
all, but that it has only retreated from its
long-familiar venue, television, and is seeking
other, more shadowy environments -- who knows?
computer games, cult religions, obscure trading
floors in faraway cities -- ready to pop up again
in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the
cheap.

Unless the state of our souls becomes once
more a subject of serious concern, there is little
question that Sloth will continue to evolve away
from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and
miracle, when daily life really was the Holy Ghost
visibly at work and time was a story, with a
beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense,
engagement deep and fatal. The Christian God was
near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of
God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.

Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in
sinning against what now seems increasingly to
define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite
sorrow, despite technology's good intentions, there
we'll sit with our heads in virtual reality, glumly
refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth
back in Sloth's good old days, full of leisurely
but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
of the Acedia Squad.